Answer to Mike Heemer'scomment on the removed Blog from this site

Let's cut to the chase here. This did NOT answer anything. I did not ask anything. There was no interrogative there at all.

The responses to the Clay Today questions were an outright end around the rules of engagement. "I contacted him by email'. Right. How did you get a copy of his answers to begin with?

What significance does having long and short versions of a Bio/Resume/Vitae have to do with anything?

Your post was not any of these. It was answers to questions that were meant to be published in Clay Today at 75 words or less.

This post would have gotten by with no problem. It is a straight forward declaration of your qualifications. The other one was not.

The problem is you got caught with your hand up to your elbow in the cookie jar and someone called you on it. Now you are trying to throw up a smoke screen to cover your retreat.

Life is easier if you don't try to talk about yourself in the third person. It appears as if that is what is going on here.

Mike Heemer

What a beautiful piece of work, Mike. You are good and also the 3rd person may exist as a couple of former employees who where fired are running this campaign. It is rumored if he is elected theese people will all be back in clerks ofice running the show. Oh yes don't we all want to return to the glorious days of the past. Who know's? we may even see Johm Keene again.

Ex,

Finder and a few others were not around to know the John Keene saga...

Please enlighten.

Thanks.

You are correct about the third person. I hadn't really thought about that too much. I do know there are a couple of staunch Spivey supporters on the blog. Maybe I was thinking that a retired O-5 would have better control of his troops.

If not, he needs to get control. If it was one of his supporters he needs to come out and fess up to their tactics, take responsibility for what they have done and make sure it doesn't happen again. My experience is that generally speaking the troops won't pull something the leader wouldn't. They know better because they've been taught better.

That is the type of leadership I learned in the Navy. Maybe the Army does things differently.

Mike Heemer

Lets get one thing straight.  As nice of a person as Mr. Spivey seems to be along with his wonderful leadership abilities and a past that must be impeccable..........i give him a 2 maybe 3% chnace of victory.  Having another choice in a race is one thing, but having the same lost choice over and over again in an office that has run smoothly since Jett was inagurated just seems like a waste of time and energy, my spew only.

As far as his responses being too long, it does not point to his or "my leadership in business and government", it points to his arrogance for not being able to follow rather simplistic rules in a free country and press.

I'm sure Mr. Spivey along with all hopefuls are great personal people and none are perfect, but don't make it seem like nothing happened or you didn't mean to, that's crap, this is politics where almost anything goes and most here are old enough and smart enough to cath onto a player trying to become an actor.

I don't want your qualifications, b/c they don't matter in politics, i want to know what Mr. Spivey would do differently and what needs to change at the most important clerks office.

And sorry, too young, who is J. Keene and does Mr. Spivey have a past in CC government emphasizing the BCC?

When J.Keene was clerk of the court, he ran this county with an iron fist. Even the BCC couldn’t act without his permission. J. Keene would sue someone at the drop of a hat. Jimmy Jett was the only commissioner who would fight back and take Mr. Keene to task. Their public battles were legendary. The needs of the citizens took a backseat to the needs of good ol’boy Keene. Finally Jimmy had enough and ran against Pappa Keene and won the election. Mr. Jett assumed the office as Clerk of the Court and started streamlining how things worked. He stepped on a lot of toes but now the Clerk’s office is accessible to the public with satellite facilities and internet web pages. You don’t read in the papers any longer about the public fights between the Clerk’s office and the BCC.

Sure, Jimmy has always been a politician but he has always been a friend to the citizens too. Mr. Spivey would have to turn water into wine before I’d vote for him over Jimmy Jett.

John Keene is a former County Clerk, another elected official driven from Clay County office in disgrace.

Briefly, his major transgressions were two.

1.  Despite ample law prohibiting it, Keene mixed public and private funds while establishing what amounted to a large unaccounted-for slush fund, officially used to promote employee morale.  When he left office, the estimates of missing money ranged up to $16 or $17 million.  It still hasn't been found.

2.  As Clerk, he sued a private citizen who was trying to find out what was going on in the Clerk's Office, nearly forcing the citizen into bankruptcy paying for a costly legal defense.  The citizen then filed a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation against Keene, which claimed Keene abused the legal process in an attempt to squash legal public inquiry into his office.  The SLAPP suit was solid and settled, of course, at taxpayer expense.

It's things like those perpetrated by County Clerk John Keene that make me cringe every time I hear another local politician say it's time to put the past behind us and look to the future.  I'd rather keep one eye on history to make sure the future doesn't repeat it.

Michael S. Mann

michaelsmann@comcast.net

Thanks, Mike for filling us in on Keene's escapades. I'm also aware that under his "reign" public documents went AWOL, or so many politicos have told me.

If memory serves me correctly, he "retired" at tax payer expense, and was not held accountable for the missing money??

There are lots of lessons provided from that chapter of Clay County political history.  Memory serves you well, Pioneer, at least about John Keene's attitude toward maintaining public records.  I, too, have heard from officials that records under his control vanished.

As a local newspaper editor during part of Keene's years in office, I can tell you as a fact from personal experience that even simple public record requests were frequently delayed and routinely made far more complicated than the law allowed. Legal requests to see public records were often met with lies intended to dissuade any further effort to have the request fulfilled, blatantly delivered with the arrogance of a person flexing the power of his office.  Anyone who watched the BCC meetings back in those days regularly saw that same Keene arrogance displayed there.

Keene was like a lot of politicians.  Once he got elected, he felt like it was his office.  Never seemed to grasp the concept that it was our office and he was nothing more than a guy we temporarily hired to shuffle the papers efficiently.

Michael S. Mann

michaelsmann@comcast.net

Hmmm...

Vanishing records, vanishing money, illegal dumping, charging personal expenses to county credit card...

Keep the history lessons coming, Mike.

The same ole' boy group that backed Keene are the same ones backing Beseler.